Creating PowerPoint custom layouts

PowerPoint Slide Masters are the best way to change the general ap­­pearance of your presentations without changing each slide. But what if you’re always tweaking a particular slide to fit your contents, such as stretching out a placeholder or creating additional placeholders for certain content? In­­stead of doing this each time, create a custom layout. In Office 2007 and 2010, layouts are now part of the Slide Master, making them easier to change and apply than in older versions.

For example, if you like to show two charts from an Excel workbook on a slide, one above the other, you’re doing a lot of resizing and tweaking. Here’s how to do that better.

Click on the View tab, then in the Masters Views group, select Slide Master.

Find a layout that’s close to what you ultimately want and select it.

Right-click and select Duplicate Layout or press Ctrl+D.

Right-click on the second slide and select Rename Layout.

Change the name to something you’ll identify with your new layout (in our example, perhaps, Two Charts).

Make the desired changes to the placeholders. In the example, we’ll resize the content placeholder and then duplicate it to provide two places for charts.

On the Slide Master tab, on the far right, click on the Close Master View button.

Now, you are ready to apply it.

Insert a new blank slide where you want to show your Two Charts slide.

Right-click on the slide in the Navigation Pane (left side of the screen) and select Two Charts layout.

Copy your first chart from Excel, click in the placeholder and paste. Use the paste options box to choose Keep Source Formatting if you want it to look the way it does in Excel. Repeat for the second one.

You’ll notice that everything is sized for placeholder, no tweaking.

Also, be sure to save the file as a template to ensure this layout is al­­ways available to you. Here are the steps:

From the Office Button or File tab, choose Save as. (Hint: You can use F12 to access Save as)

In the Save as type field, choose PowerPoint template and name it some­­thing you can easily find again. In our example, we named it Template with Charts.

Using Ctrl+A in the Navigation Pane, select all slides, then press Delete.

Close and save the template file.

When you want to use the template, choose New from the File tab or Office button. Then choose the templates you just created from My Templates. It will include your new layout.

Small Business Tax

Just login with your email address to instantly generate a PDF of this content.

Default Widget

This is Sidebar 1. You can edit the content that appears here by visiting your Widgets panel and modifying the current widgets in Sidebar 1. Or, if you want to be a true ninja, you can add your own content to this sidebar by using the appropriate hooks.